


You've Been Living Your Predicament

by magnificentbastards



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: F/M, Gen, additional warnings for reference to malnutrition (just to be safe), ambiguously sexual unhealthy relationships, violent crime and fashion: the fic; the character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 21:59:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnificentbastards/pseuds/magnificentbastards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Today he’s in a deep bottle-green coat trimmed in pale golden silk, black trousers and waistcoat, his cravat starched white linen and his hat tall and narrow-brimmed; the white cotton gloves are blood-stained up to the wrists, now, so he discards them in the gutter at the side of the street. The blood spattered up the cane he carries, even with the hidden knife in the handle slid back into its sheath, can stay just where it is. He wants the street to know precisely who is walking down it.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've Been Living Your Predicament

Tonight’s work takes Montparnasse to the Rue Moreau, up in the easternmost corner of the city, on the heels of a stately old bourgeois gentleman with an expensive coat, a folded roll of banknotes in each pocket, and golden rings on his fingers. The light is low by the time the old man gets home, so Montparnasse fingers the knife in his belt and ducks around the back of the house to smoke one of his new-fashioned cigarettes and wait for the sun to set.

When it does, he tries the servant’s entrance set at the bottom of a short flight of stairs and finds it unlocked; there’s an oil lamp burning on the wall in the corridor he enters, and it stretches his shadow long and misshapen across the floor as he walks toward the staircase. He climbs two flights of stairs silently, tracing one hand over the knot of his cravat. The first room he peers into once he’s reached the top floor must be a nursery: there’s a bookshelf and the dark shapes of toys scattered in the corner and a child-sized lump under the covers of each of the beds. He moves on.

Warm orange light leaks out in straight lines from beneath the door of the next room, and Montparnasse pauses to stand with his ear against it for a moment. Satisfied, he removes his hat to place it gently on the floor of the landing, palms the flat dagger in his sleeve, and pushes the door open.

The old man is sitting in bed reading, and when he sees Montparnasse he jerks upright and says, “I beg your pardon, monsieur, who – ”

Montparnasse crosses the room in three strides, pulling the handkerchief out of his pocket with his spare hand, and is kneeling astride the bed with the cloth over the old man’s mouth before he has finished speaking. The threadbare silk is hot and damp beneath his fingers within moments, but it muffles the old man’s shouts without silencing them – Montparnasse says, “Keep your voice down or I shall cut out your tongue,” but either the man does not hear or he is too afraid to understand.

Well, no matter: instead Montparnasse curls his fingers around the handle of the dagger in his palm and presses the flat of it against the old man’s throat. This stills him a little – then Montparnasse hisses, “If you do not shut up you will wake your children, and if they come to see what the matter is with Papa I should have to shut them up too,” and that stills him entirely.

The dagger stays where it is as Montparnasse checks over his shoulder to ensure they’ve not drawn the rest of the household up to the bedroom, and then he says, “There is a safebox in the house for your money, is there not – and don’t lie to me, I know your type. Is the money you were handing out to vagrants today in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in there?”

When the old man swallows and speaks, Montparnasse can feel it in the wrist that holds the knife: “The safebox is behind the portrait on the opposite wall – the key is in the topmost drawer of the dresser – take it all, sir, but pray do not harm my family –”

Montparnasse presses his lips together and gives a non-committal hum as he balls the handkerchief in his fist and shoves it inside the old man’s mouth. He changes his mind as he’s turning away from the bed toward the other side of the room, and spins on his heel as though dancing a gavotte to push the blade of the dagger up through the old man’s chin, as deep as he can get it, so that the man’s eyes go very wide as he dies. He makes a wet, bubbling, choking noise like he’s drowning as Montparnasse pulls the knife out.

The old man’s corpse slumps down against the pillows, and it doesn’t take long before they’re drenched with blood along with the nightshirt he wears. Montparnasse wipes the handle of the dagger off on the sheets, wrinkles his nose at the spreading cloying smell of it, and leaves his spoiled handkerchief to sit blood-soaked in the pierced throat of the dead man.

It is convenient, in his line of work, that fear makes certain men desperately honest: he picks up a handful of rings and lockets from the drawer along with the key, winks at the portrait’s disapproving stare as he pulls it off its hooks, and swings the unlocked safebox door open to find it full to bursting with rolled banknotes; there are _assignats_ in here from the First Republic, probably. He stores it all in the bag stuffed up his shirtsleeve, and drops the jewellery in his pockets – it will ruin the line of his coat, but doubtless no one will be around to see it, at this hour.

When he leaves the room he picks his hat up from the floor, putting it back on as he passes the nursery. Very quietly, he says to the wealthy sleeping newly-bereaved children on the other side of the door, “For myself, I found becoming an orphan a very beneficial circumstance – take my advice and ensure it serves you as well, little ones.”

Then he tilts his hat to angle just-so upon his head, and leaves the house through the front door.

\--

When Montparnasse wakes up, Eponine is sitting on the edge of the bed wearing one of his undershirts and turning a folded bit of paper over and over in her hands. He can see the little bony bumps and indents of the top of her spine standing out like a row of teeth through the fabric as she leans forward; her posture is terrible, and he tells her so.

“Why do you think I’d care about something like that,” she snaps as he sits up, rolling the stiffness out of his shoulders and pushing his hair out of his face.

“It’s important,” he says, and he’d lean back against the wall but it’s covered in soot and dirt and probably old dried blood, so he swings his legs over the edge of the bed and stands up instead. “If you can’t wear your clothes well it doesn’t matter how well-tailored they are, you might as well dress in rags.”

The noise she makes as he steps past her towards his wardrobe suggests that she’s spitting, at him or at the floor, and he sniffs loftily. She says, “I _do_ dress in rags, _monsieur_ , and I wear them badly too.”

“As though I wasn’t well aware,” he says, and when he opens the door of his wardrobe the scuffed and blurred mirror hung on the inside catches the last of his sneer. He’d killed a rich old widow and her pretty young daughter for that mirror; it has moved with him from basement to attic, bridge arches to sewers to grotty backroom lodgings, and to this day it is one of his most prized possessions.

He reaches inside the top drawer of the wardrobe and brings out the whalebone-and-silk men’s corset he has worn daily (since they came into style, and since he was old enough, and since he got his hands on the necessities to acquire one), fitting it over his undershirt and hooking it tight at the back. That done, he runs a hand down his waist, cocks his hip at the mirror; Eponine’s reflection stares back at him over his shoulder, and he finds himself amused by the fact that he is far more shapely than her hungry collection of hollows and angles.

“A corset,” she scoffs, having made no move to get dressed herself, “if I saw you from a distance I should think you a perfumed and laced mademoiselle trying on a pair of men’s trousers for size.”

The shirt he picks from the rail is his cleanest and newest, and Montparnasse buttons it with the collar turned up to brush his earlobes, slipping flat knives under the leather straps around his wrists. He says, “Envy is unbecoming on you,” and unfolds today’s trousers (pale golden-brown satin, with bronze buttons at the fall-front and at the hem of each leg and purple embroidery at the waist) before stepping into them, hooking another dagger into the loop on the inside of the waistband.

Eponine spits again, and it hits the floor by his foot; he turns his head briefly to see she has pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms close around them as she glares in his direction. She says, “I am a creature of envy, when I am not one of spite and filth and hunger. You won’t find me changing my nature.”

It is an unnecessary elaboration, even with the veiled jab at Montparnasse included – she does not say anything of which he was not already aware. If she’d only turn to petty violence and murder, he thinks, she would perfect herself; but perhaps she is not quite spiteful or envious enough for that.

He hooks the buttonholes of the pair of braces in his hand around the buttons at the front and back of the waistline of his trousers, pulling them down over his shoulder and running a thumb across the gold-on-black embroidery. The fabric matches that of his waistcoat: black silk covered with twisted golden vines and birds in flight, the buttons mother-of-pearl and the lapels rounded.

“Pass me a cravat from the box at the end of the bed,” he says, turning halfway around.

Eponine says, “Fetch it yourself, idler, I’m no one’s maidservant to run their effects back and forth,” and he rolls his eyes and slopes across the rough floorboards of the room to pick a black silk cravat out of the pile in the clumsily-hewn wooden box on the floor.

Returning to the mirror, Montparnasse wraps the centre of the cravat around his neck, pulls the ends forward to cross them around his collar again, and says, “If you weren’t so stubborn and obnoxious you _could_ take a maidservant job, you know – some rich baron would buy you more than rags for cleaning his townhouse.”

“Pah,” she says, as he tugs the topmost end of the cravat through the loop of the lower end, “and have my father take all I earned and waste it on some fool’s scheme to triple his fortune? Besides, I haven’t cleaned a thing in my life.”

“That much is obvious,” Montparnasse says disdainfully, tugging at the sides of the completed knot to widen it and pull it down as he checks his reflection in the mirror. “You can read but you can’t sweep – you’re a veritable _lady._ ”

At that she laughs, hoarse and bitter and nearly choking, and kicks her legs into the air as she falls backward onto the bed, putting on an accent that doesn’t suit her at all: “Yes, yes, I am a philanthropic duchess living amongst the lowest orders of the slums, I have even pulled out my teeth to make the disguise more convincing, and if you’re _very_ nice to me perhaps I shall choose you to receive my huge charitable fortune – ”

He raises his eyebrows at her, but smirks all the same. From the wardrobe he picks out a deep purple wool frock coat, the lining and the lapels both striped with the same gold-and-white silk, and fits it over his shoulders to button tight at his waist; then he moves to sit on the end of the bed next to Eponine’s filthy bare feet, her muddied and cracked heels nearly brushing his thigh, and picks up the black leather boots resting against the wall by the door.

“You work on allocating your fortune, then, mademoiselle,” he says sardonically as he does up the buttons at his shins, casting a glance across to Eponine lying still on the threadbare sheets, “and I’ll continue making mine.”

With that, he picks his hat off the floor by its curled black brim, places it atop his head, and adds, “Do not laze around my lodgings all day – I shall be working near St Sulpice, if you fancy assisting.”

“I won’t,” says Eponine as Montparnasse steps through the door, and it might be a response to both his statements or only to one, “Don’t flatter yourself, I’ve better things to do.”

\--

Montparnasse has been tapping his foot on the stone at the foot of the grating that leads into the sewer of the Arche-Marion, holding his nose against the rising stench of the subterranean secrets of the city, for nearly twenty minutes before he hears the rapid _tap-tap-tap_ of feet on the nocturnal, deserted street above him and Gavroche’s voice singing out high and clear: “ _Nous n’avions plus ni nobles, ni prêtres -- Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!_ ”

With the arranged sign called, it only takes a moment before Gavroche comes tripping down the steps and wheeling round the corner, dropping a handful of silver coins and a couple of jewelled necklaces at Montparnasse’s feet before slipping through the bent open grating into the sewer and away. His footsteps echo as he runs; Montparnasse calls after him, “That’s not half the loot you said you’d bring, gamin!” and Gavroche’s reply (“Catch me and I’ll give you the rest of it!”) is repeated over and over by the hollow acoustics of the sewer walls.

Montparnasse scowls in Gavroche’s general direction, but he hasn’t time to follow the boy up on it; there are more footsteps on the street above, and he casts his gaze upward to see the man he’s being paid to get rid of tonight passing across the top of the stairs behind Babet. From here, Montparnasse can’t hear their whispered conversation. His target is backing away from Babet as though to turn in a different direction, shaking his head, when from the shadows in the gutter rises another piece of shadow, given limbs and force – Claquesous wraps himself around the man like fog, bearing him down the stairs into the arms of Gueulemer who waits at the bottom.

“Don’t you dare,” snaps Montparnasse, and his voice carries across the low gurgling of the sewer water to freeze his lieutenants in their places, “Leave him to me.”

Gueulemer growls like an animal, hefting the man in his giant’s arms and throwing him to fall with a heavy _thud_ in front of Montparnasse. Claquesous, robbed of his sport for the night, melts away into the darker patches of shadow in the storm drain by the edge of the road; Babet remains where he is, standing at the top of the stairs, the moonlight glinting off his spectacles as he peers down at the scene below.

Montparnasse does much of his work by dagger and knife, but there is certainly something to be said for the bludgeon. The heft of it in his hand is comfortably familiar. With his fingers wrapped around the base of the wood and his feet set apart, the club feels like nothing more than a natural extension of his arm, so he swings it back and over his head and down, hard, as the man on the floor is struggling to his knees.

And, yes, Montparnasse is a scrawny, skinny, feline thing, but every inch of him is muscle: he breaks the man’s shoulder.

The resulting howl of shock and pain is muffled when Montparnasse backhands the man hard across the face, and even in the half-light beneath the steps the wounds his rings open as they connect show up dark and uneven. He kicks the man in the teeth, buckling his unsteady knees so he falls face-first onto the paving stones and scrapes half the skin off his palms in the process; Montparnasse is going to have to clean the blood off his shoes later. His second kick catches his target’s stomach, so that the man coughs and chokes and curls inward as though trying to bend himself in half. It does no good against the next blow of the club, nor the one after that.

Before long he’s grown tired with the stretch and strain in the sinews of his arm, the spatters of blood up the legs of his trousers with each swing and thud of the bludgeon: he ends it with three strikes in quick succession, right into the crown of his target’s head, so that there’s hardly very much head left to aim at by the end of it.

“Help me get this inside,” he says, raising his voice and pointing the shiny blood-slick toe of his boot at the body. Gueulemer slopes over and lifts the corpse over his shoulder as though it’s a ragdoll, pulls the bent and broken grating at the entrance of the sewer wider, and makes his way before Montparnasse and Babet down the steps leading underground. The stench rises around them as they pause at the base of the steps.

Babet lights a match, and then a candle, and by its dull glow Montparnasse crouches to strip the rings off the man’s fingers, the watch from his pocket, and the banknotes from the lining of his coat. These he drops in the bag at his side, before pulling the man’s coat from his back and the shoes from his feet.

“You ought to have left me the teeth,” says Babet quietly, reproachfully, “They’d sell.”

“Next time,” says Montparnasse, with an errant shrug that implies he does not particularly plan on preserving with care the dental fixings of the next man he kills, either; and then he primes the heel of his boot against the crushed back of the corpse and shoves it forward to roll over the edge of the stone walkway on which they stand, down near enough twenty feet to hit the rolling shit-and-water sludge that streams ceaselessly through Paris’ carved-out intestines.

It passes into the depths of the sewer very quickly, and before it is out of sight Montparnasse has turned to disappear in silence through the entrance to the nearest tunnel, the dead man’s effects tucked under his arm.

\--

In the southernmost corner of the Rue des Forges, at the heart of the wasp’s-nest of a slum cramped and stacked buzzing atop itself between the Rue du Caire and the Rue Reamur, a door swings open, and moments later Montparnasse strides through it.

Today he’s in a deep bottle-green coat trimmed in pale golden silk, black trousers and waistcoat, his cravat starched white linen and his hat tall and narrow-brimmed; the white cotton gloves are blood-stained up to the wrists, now, so he discards them in the gutter at the side of the street. The blood spattered up the cane he carries, even with the hidden knife in the handle slid back into its sheath, can stay just where it is. He wants the street to know precisely who is walking down it.

He reminds himself, swinging the cane forward as he steps lightly through the mud and filth caked almost-solid on the paving stones, that he has given the street very little opportunity to forget.

In the building to his left, shutters are pulled closed on every floor as he passes; the one-legged dying old man in the gutter tries to hide behind his rags, curl deeper into the dirt; a group of street children swordfighting with sticks and metal poles pause in their sport to watch him go, and a woman washing clothes in brown-tinged water out of a window flinches as he raises a hand to adjust his hat. They shrink away from him all the way up the street.

At the corner of the Rue du Caire, Eponine is leaning against the wall of a patched-up wood-and-mud shack, the wet straw hiding her feet suggesting that it functions as a pen for some animal or other. She shows no sign of having noticed his presence until he stops in front of her, and then she looks him up and down and says, “Finished for the day, are you?”

“For the _day_ ,” he says, and steps smartly to the left to avoid the rhythmic _drip-drip-drip_ of water from the leaking guttering of the house they stand beneath, “but the night is yet young, and I do my best work under cover of darkness. As you know.”

 Instead of a reply, she reaches inside the collection of mismatched, dirty fabrics piled around her hips and brings out a handful of coloured wooden disks and a few centimes. He extends his hand; she drops them into his palm, one after the other, and he passes the tokens through his fingers once or twice, lifts one to his face to check the marks carved on the wood.

“Those are from my father,” she says, pronounces the last word like it’s spoiled meat in her mouth, “so you’ll know what they mean, I’m sure.”

The disks are calls to a meeting place, specifying time and purpose: tonight, it seems, Montparnasse will be carrying out his work in the alleys and stepped inclines in the north of town. He files them one by one into his pocket, and when he’s done he turns the centimes over in his hand and looks up to see Eponine turning to walk up the street.

He follows after her, glancing over her tangled rat’s-nest hair and her torn skirts, and says as he draws level with her, “Will you not be joining us tonight?”

“Joining you!” she crows incredulously, and when she continues talking she sounds vicious and spiteful, the kind of girl to snarl and claw out your eyes if you look at her wrong, “I don’t do your work, monsieur, and I certain as Hell don’t do it on your orders.”

“Suit yourself and starve, then,” he replies haughtily. He has his collar buttoned high up to his chin and held in place by his necktie – because the dictates of fashion are the only authority he’ll choose to obey – and it hides the marks Eponine’s fingernails left on his neck the night before last, but even now he can still feel them.

As they round the corner to the Rue de l’Alexandrie, Montparnasse still swinging his cane and stepping neatly through the throngs of people packing their street-stalls away and pulling their wide-eyed children along by the hand, Eponine says, “I won’t starve, you’ll see. Something far more exciting will happen first.”

The noise of disdain he makes at that probably speaks for itself. Eponine bares her teeth at him and turns on her heel, calling over her shoulder as she departs into the growing crowd: “I hope you get blood all over your pretty, pretty coat!”

Well, he pays her no mind. Halfway down the street, as he continues on his way, an old woman is selling yellow roses; he reaches into his pocket to flip her a coin, and purses his lips in a smile when she snatches it from the air and hands him a flower all without meeting his eyes, let alone checking that his coinage is the genuine article.

He runs two fingers down the barbed stem of the rose, holds the flower to his nose to inhale the scent of it above the smell of sweat and shit and spoiled wine that rises from the very cobblestones of the street. With a smile, he threads the stem of the rose through two buttonholes in the lapel of his jacket, angles it to contrast with the knot of his cravat, and steps into the street to head north towards the entrance to the sewer network that will bring him to the Faubourg Montmartre. On either side of him, the crowd parts to let him pass, shooting nervous glances his way when they think he cannot see them.

His stays keep his back straight and his waist nipped in, and his hat and the padded shoulders of his coat fashion him stately, but the awe of the beggars of the slum-streets makes him tall: if this is a _cour des miracles_ , he is certainly the king at the heart of it.

The open storm-drain lies set back in the gutter next to the raised walkway by the Rue St. Nicolas, and though the street is full of people not one of them notices the slender dark shadow move to pause, statuesque, by the entrance of it. Montparnasse casts his gaze over his surface kingdom, the ancient rotting dirt-smeared buildings and the hurried harried people who pass between them, beggars and workers and whores and his own knives-for-hire.

The underworld of the city and its unsavoury denizens are his domain and under his sovereignty, a sovereignty he has won by dagger and bludgeon and coin. He has made his dominion over the Parisian underground quite literal, he thinks, and smiles as he turns to descend the slope behind the metal grating into the sewers.

The darkness prises itself like threadbare silk off the walls to form his cloak; he slips into it as oil in water, and the bowels of the city swallow him whole.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure how much there is to say about this one, except that this boy is awful and irredeemable and _delightful_ to write. geographical references come mostly from [this](http://www.chanvrerie.net/paris/1839map.pdf) map, the song Gavroche sings is of course [_Ça ira_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87a_Ira#Sans-culotte_version), _cour des miracles_ /court of miracles refers to certain slum districts of Paris between the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries, and you can find some basic information about the kinds of clothes Montparnasse would have worn [here](http://www.cfa.ilstu.edu/lmlowel/the334/romantic/rommenreview.htm).


End file.
